'You're a bunch of lying liars and the media agrees': NDP to Tories in attack ad

A new attack ad from the NDP takes aim at the Harper government by borrowing criticisms of the Tories from the Canadian media.

The new video, called Lying Liars, features a series of quotations critical of the Conservatives from Canadian newspapers, magazines and broadcasters from the month of September, set to circus-like music.

Most of the quotations appear to be opinion and analysis pieces that criticized how the Tories repeated, ad nauseum, that a hypothetical NDP government would hypothetically implement a “$20 billion carbon tax.”

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has framed his party’s proposal as a cap-and-trade system — one similar to what was promised by the Conservatives in 2008.

The NDP attack ad lists the source of each quotation, but like virtually all political ads it doesn’t bother with such trivialities as context or providing links to the original article.

The quote attributed to the National Post came from columnist Andrew Coyne’s article entitled “Harper’s Tories may have perfected dumb, dishonest, attack-dog politics, but they didn’t invent it.”

The return of Parliament has certainly reminded us yet again how eye-bleedingly stupid our politics is generally, and of the Tories’ own particular contributions to the lexicon of mindlessly repeated mistruths. But we should not think that any of this is new. More overt, certainly. Worse, perhaps. But not new.

To be fair, some of the quotes the NDP used are entirely accurate of the writer’s intentions.

For example, the line attributed to the Ottawa Citizen — “I’m calling them cynical liars who would wince when they look in the mirror if they had the slightest intellectual integrity: — comes from a Dan Gardner column in which he also accuses the Tories of “contempt for Canadians,” thinking Canadians are “morons” and “gobsmacking cynicism.”

The endless back-and-forth between the NDP and the Tories over the non-existing, non-proposed “job killing carbon tax” has done little to improve question period’s reputation low-minded partisan debate.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has complained to House Speaker Andrew Scheer about the personal attacks in the House resulting from the carbon tax spat.

“They are getting really quite despicable,” she said, criticizing the “ridiculous, non-stop carbon tax debate back and forth” between Tory and NDP MPs during question period.